Trendspotting at Gartner IOCS 2025

Inside the Sessions

The Xensam team recently joined global IT leaders at Gartner’s IT Infrastructure, Operations & Cloud Strategies Conference (IOCS) 2025 in London.

As well as delivering our own session, “The End of the CIO? What comes next”, we had our ears to the ground for more perspectives on the flux facing CIOs in a world of SaaS sprawl and shadow AI, with workers at more than 90% of companies using personal chatbot accounts for daily tasks, often without approval from IT. ¹

Over the two days, the sessions focused on achieving resilience, controlling costs, improving visibility, and preparing I&O teams for a more autonomous, AI-driven operational future. Here’s some of the key insights we gathered from being on the ground at Gartner IOCS 2025.

AI cost volatility and unpredictability:

Coming into the event, there was a big focus on the difficulty of forecasting AI spend. Prior to the event, Reuters reported on the wildly differing forecasts for the AI market between analysts. PwC, for example, reckons AI could contribute up to $15.7 trillion to the global economy in 2030, while McKinsey has estimated the figure at $2.6 trillion to $4.4 trillion.²

Organisations are finding this increasingly challenging, especially as pilot workloads give way to production. Unplanned usage spikes, decentralised deployments, and poor data on consumption are making financial management significantly harder.

Controlling the runaway adoption of shadow AI

A running theme throughout the conference was the speed at which new AI and SaaS tools are spreading within organisations. This was no surprise, with Gartner estimating that global SaaS spend will hit $300b this year.³ What’s worse is that is happening often without IT or procurement involvement, and organisations are concerned about the risks of unapproved data flows, inconsistent governance, and hidden costs.

Cloud cost pressure, vendor lock-in, and negotiation headaches:

Attendees voiced frustration over shifting pricing models, complex enterprise agreements, and unanticipated renewals. Vendor consolidation, and more rigorous negotiation strategies, are now high on the agenda for CIOs who need a foundation of stability from which to innovate.

Demand for automation, observability, and agentic operations:

As environments grow in complexity, IO leaders are increasingly focused on smarter, connected tooling. Many of the sessions at Gartner IOCS 2025 focused on how new automation models – such as agentic and autonomous ops – are helping teams do more with less, and increase reliability through smarter, connected tooling.

Resilience, security, and sovereignty in hybrid IT environments:

As expected, security formed the basis of several keynotes and conversations at the event. Key themes ranged from ransomware recovery to jurisdictional risk. The move to distribute workloads across public cloud, private, and edge deployments is driving urgent conversations around sovereignty, data jurisdiction, and compliance, especially for enterprises that operate in multiple regions worldwide.

The future of the CIO role

Gartner’s own analysts stressed the need for CIOs to operate as orchestrators, rather than command-and-control gatekeepers. This will see CIOs beginning to take on the task of unifying cloud, SaaS, AI, security, and FinOps, while enabling speed and stronger governance.

Beyond the Stages: what attendees were talking about at Gartner IOCS 2025

Away from the plenaries, practitioners shared various practical realities:

• Decentralised SaaS adoption is rampant: many described tools going viral inside teams before procurement or security caught on.

• Visibility gaps are hampering cloud and SaaS modernisation, with teams still relying on spreadsheets and incomplete discovery data.

• Small I&O/SAM teams struggle to juggle multiple, heavy platforms, amplifying demand for automation and truly integrated solutions.

• There’s a surge in demand for integrations with ITSM platforms like ServiceNow, making it easier to link asset discovery, usage, and incident management.

Looking Ahead: 2026 and the CIO’s next challenge

With all this in mind, the direction for CIOs in coming into sharp focus for 2026.

Taking their organisations on a successful modernisation journey will depend on having accurate, real-time visibility into every facet of SaaS and AI usage.

With stricter data sovereignty and compliance rules setting a higher standard year-on-year, CIOs must give their teams the ability to govern data flows confidently across clouds, geographies, and regulatory regimes as a priority.

All of this combines to a definitive shift in the CIO role itself. CIOs are quickly going to become orchestrators in this new IT environment, aligning cloud, security, FinOps, and innovation under one clear banner of strategy and driving a culture where autonomy and automation become baseline expectations.